Roman Fever by Edith Wharton
Quick answer: Roman Fever by Edith Wharton: full summary with the famous last line explained, characters, themes of rivalry and respectability, and Wharton's twist craft.
Two widowed American ladies of ripe but well-cared-for middle age sit on a Roman terrace above the Forum, knitting and reminiscing, while their daughters are off with young aviators; by dusk, twenty-five years of friendship will be unpicked to the last stitch. Edith Wharton published Roman Fever in Liberty magazine in 1934 and collected it in The World Over. It is her most anthologised story and one of the most perfectly sprung traps in American fiction.
Nothing happens except conversation. Two chairs, one view, no interruptions: Wharton strips away every prop of plot and lets rivalry do the work of an army. Students study it for irony, since the story ends on a reversal so complete that the whole text reads differently the second time. Writers study it because it proves a duel can be staged entirely in dialogue, with weapons no heavier than a phrase about the weather, or a name.
The story in brief, ending included
Alida Slade and Grace Ansley, friends and neighbours since girlhood, find themselves together in Rome, each with a marriageable daughter. From her chair, Mrs Slade takes inventory: she, the widow of a brilliant lawyer, has the vivid daughter Barbara, while quiet Mrs Ansley produced only the angelic but unremarkable Jenny, a puzzle, Mrs Slade thinks, given what museum pieces the Ansley parents were. Talk drifts to the Roman fever of their grandmothers' day, and to how girls were once kept in after sunset for fear of the damp and of other dangers. Slowly Mrs Slade steers toward an old night: the winter both women, then unmarried, were in Rome, and Grace, delicate, fell ill after an after-dark visit to the Colosseum. Then Mrs Slade springs her secret: she knows why Grace went. She herself forged the letter, signed with the initials of Delphin Slade, then Alida's fiancé, inviting Grace to a moonlit meeting, meaning to frighten off a rival by sending her to wait in the cold for a man who would never come.
The cruelty misfires twice. Grace, devastated at losing her one treasured letter's authenticity, quietly reveals the first misfire: she answered the letter, and Delphin came. The meeting Alida invented took place. Mrs Slade rallies around her last possession, the marriage itself: Grace had the letter, but Alida had Delphin for twenty-five years, and Grace had nothing but a note he did not even write. Mrs Ansley rises, gathers her knitting, and delivers the second and fatal misfire in the story's last line: I had Barbara. The brilliant daughter is Delphin's child, conceived that night at the Colosseum, and Grace moves ahead of Mrs Slade toward the stairway as the story ends.
The characters and what they want
Two women, two daughters, and a dead man who never appears.
Themes and meaning
Name the exam themes: female rivalry conducted under the etiquette of friendship, the illusion of respectability, and the past as unexploded ordnance. Roman fever itself works as the governing metaphor, the old disease becomes the fever of jealousy and desire that infected that long-ago winter and never quite left the blood. The setting earns an essay paragraph of its own: ruins of empires below the terrace, ruins of a friendship above, and Rome as the city where every generation's passions are buried one layer down.
The sharper point concerns who wins. The last line hands Grace the material victory, Delphin's child, but reread the story and notice that Wharton has spent most of it inside Alida's head, cataloguing her envy, letting her patronise Grace sentence after sentence. The reversal punishes the point of view itself: the character who presumed to narrate the other woman's smallness is revealed to have understood nothing. That is the story's deepest irony, and it is structural, not verbal.
The craft: the double reversal
Wharton builds the ending as two hammer blows, each answering an assertion of power. Alida's confession of the forged letter is her attack; Grace's I answered it is the counter; Alida's I had him for twenty-five years is the rally; I had Barbara ends the match. The technique to steal is the escalating exchange in which each revelation redefines every fact before it, and the last line is withheld until the physical exit, delivered while moving, no reply possible. Note that the clue, Barbara's inexplicable brilliance, was planted in Alida's own musings on the first pages: the loser supplied the evidence of her own defeat.
For a writer, the story is also a lesson in armament by dialogue. There is no action to stage, so Wharton loads the pauses, the knitting, the small deflections, and lets politeness function as suspense: the longer the courtesies hold, the more terrible the pressure beneath them. Writory's Short Story Contest judges score dialogue under the language strand, and this story is the standing demonstration that talk can carry an entire plot if every line is secretly a move.
What poets can take from this
- For exams, define the title's three layers: the literal disease, the fever of passion in the mothers' generation, and the rivalry still burning on the terrace.
- Track the knitting: Grace's needles are her defence, and she puts them away just before the final line.
- Point out that the clue to the twist, Barbara's brilliance, appears in Mrs Slade's own envious thoughts.
- Writers: build a duel scene where each revelation retroactively rewrites the previous one.
- Deliver your final blow in four words or fewer, while the speaker is exiting.
- Let the point-of-view character be the one the ending punishes; irony lands hardest at home.
Try it yourself
Write a story that is one conversation between two old friends, each holding a secret about the same long-ago night. Every exchange must shift the balance of power, and the last line, spoken on the way out, must rewrite everything the reader assumed.
Questions
What does the last line of Roman Fever mean?
Grace Ansley's final words, I had Barbara, reveal that her brilliant daughter is Delphin Slade's child, conceived at the Colosseum meeting Alida tried to fake. The forged letter meant to humiliate Grace instead gave her the encounter, the child, and the story's final victory.
What is the irony in Roman Fever?
Alida forged a letter to send her rival into the cold for nothing, but Grace answered it and Delphin came, so the trick produced the very betrayal it pretended. A second irony is structural: the story is told through Alida's condescending view of Grace, and the ending proves she understood nothing.
What does Roman fever symbolise in the story?
Literally the malaria that once made Rome dangerous after dark, it becomes a figure for the concealed passions, jealousy and desire that infected the two friends in their youth. The title suggests that this fever, unlike the disease, was never cured.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the August contest and have your own poem read and scored.